This invention relates to improvements in a control system for remotely controlling the operation of passenger conveyors such as escalators, moving walks etc.
Recently passenger conveyors have been strikingly propagated so that they are indispensable to equipments disposed in departmentstores, railway stations etc. It has been already practiced to selectively operate passenger conveyors at the high and low speeds to improve the transport capacity thereof, to halt them during the light traffic for the purpose of saving the electric power consumed by the passenger conveyors and so on. In addition, it has been proposed to efficiently operate a plurality of passenger conveyors by controlling the number thereof simultaneously put in operation, the operating direction and speed thereof etc.
As it is troublesome to manually accomplish this control of operation of passenger conveyors, a central control room or the like is generally provided to collectively control the passenger conveyors. This results in the necessity of using television receivers to monitor the operation of the passenger conveyors because of their remote operation. More specifically, one television camera is disposed adjacent to each of the passenger conveyors to pick up the movement of the latter and remotely operated switches operatively coupled to each passenger conveyor is operated while the movement thereof is monitored by viewing it reproduced on an associated television receiver.
Under these circumstances, it can not be said that there will be no case where some remotely operated switch may be actuated with forgetting the monitoring of the passenger conveyor through the television receiver. In that event the passenger conveyor to be monitored is fully out of the control resulting in a serious danger. Even when one of a plurality of passenger conveyors is monitored through a television receiver, a remotely operated switch operatively coupled to another passenger conveyor may be erroneously operated. This is very dangerous as much as a failure of the monitoring. As such erroneous operations due to illusions are liable to be usually caused. This has brought about problems in collectively controlling the operation of passenger conveyors.